WEBVTT

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I'm taking your water,
Daniel, because I need

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a moment after your reading.

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And you have your
own thing to drink.

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It's my pleasure to
welcome Solmaz Sharif

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to this town who's
so rich with people

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who love words, no matter what.

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And I think in that way this
town has always been your town,

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and we've always been
the people of your book.

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Born in Istanbul,
to Iranian parents,

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Solmaz Sharif holds
degrees from UC Berkeley,

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where she studied and
taught with June Jordan's

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Poetry for the People and
from New York University.

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Her work has appeared
widely and recognized

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by a slew of awards
and fellowships

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of which I will only mention
the Stegner, the NEA, the Lilly

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Rosenberg, and the Rona
Jaffe Foundation Award.

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Tonight though we're here
to celebrate and to hear

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her read from her first
poetry collection, Look,

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published this year
by Graywolf Press.

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Of this book, you
are likely to read

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that it denatures the
internal language of US

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military intervention
that Sharif

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takes from the
Department of Defense

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dictionary of military
and associated terms.

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This is certainly the case.

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But I worry that these
reviews and commentaries

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edge a little too
close to the idea

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that the poet
engages in this work

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to naturalize a
language of war again,

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in some transformative
alchemy, that in this book when

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a witness might break into
eros or into something

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like traditional elegy, we
readers of the First World

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might again find the
pleasures of poetry

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exactly where and
how we left them.

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To get us to the reading quickly
I won't cite the many instances

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in this book where
Sharif performs

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swift and understated
interventions

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into both the
language she borrows

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and the lived
experiences she relates.

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So that we see the
system and the person,

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the story in the moment,
the patrimony and the body.

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But I'll say now that I'm deeply
awed and grateful for Sharif's

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way of levitating those pieces
without ever reconciling them

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into something my
eye might domesticate

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into a constellation.

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Sharif herself
outlines the stakes

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and the real intervention
of this book.

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Speaking publicly of the
long and painful relationship

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she developed with the source
language for this project,

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she states, "I wanted
at first for the poems

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to be literal
definitions, and it

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would be like poetic
definitions of the words that

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somehow revealed the
truth of the terms.

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And it was very one to one.

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What happened then is that
the language of warfare

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remained in the
actual act of warfare

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that we commonly
accept as warfare,

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and it remains
something that happened

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to Iraq and to
Afghanistan specifically.

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So then I was just trafficking
in the same violence

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that I was supposedly
trying to buck.

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So I thought that
this language should

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be something that actually
infiltrates and disrupts

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every pretty picture I
wanted to paint with my words

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and with my life.

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Because I do think
that's what it means

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to live in the US right now.

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I mean, I think that the formal
reality of living in the US

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is this split
between the violence

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that we are constantly
perpetuating,

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the violence that some of us
have to constantly witness,

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and those of us, on
the other hand, who

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don't have to necessarily
witness those violences,

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and where we seem to
believe those borders are.

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I just wanted a formal
way to challenge that."

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That challenge is a scene,
another definition perhaps

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of the book's title, Look.

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And in being seen, no matter how
ugly, how unjustifiably safe,

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how irreconcilable we
are, that is a gift.

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Thank you, Solmaz Sharif.

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